Celeste Pilegard has been awarded a 2015 American Psychological Association Dissertation Research Award (against very stiff nationwide competition). The award of $1000 is to be used to help offset Celeste's dissertation costs. Congratulations to Celeste!

Jim Blascovich, Distinguished Professor and the Co-Founder and Director of the Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior, is planning to retire in March of 2016. Over the past 40 years, the last 20 of which were spent at UCSB, Jim’s many contributions have indelibly changed the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, the field of social psychology, and UCSB.

Professors Mike Miller, Scott Grafton, and colleagues use brain scans to determine the mechanism behind cognitive control of thoughts

The human brain does not come with an operating manual. However, a group of scientists from UC Santa Barbara and the University of Pennsylvania have developed a way to convert structural brain imaging techniques into “wiring diagrams” of connections between brain regions.

When a commercial jet crashed on landing in San Francisco, it was ultimately determined that the plane had slowed to an unsafe speed during approach — and no one in the cockpit noticed in time to prevent the accident.

With pilots assigned to monitoring aircraft position, speed, altitude and an array of other automated functions as they appear on a computer screen during flight, how could such a major lapse occur? Easily, suggests a new study, which posits that the nature of the task itself is a recipe for failure.

Professor Richard Mayer is the winner of the 2015 Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) Outstanding Book Award for his book, Computer Games for Learning: An Evidence Based Approach.

UCSB Psychological & Brain Sciences researcher Bella DePaulo’s new book examines a modern lifestyle movement that is foregoing the conventional nuclear-family-in-suburbia model for a no-size-fits-all, home-is-what-you-make-it approach.

The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) has selected Professor Brenda Major of the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at UCSB to be a co-recipient, along with Jennifer Crocker of Ohio State University, of the 2015 Donald T. Campbell Award in Social Psychology. The award is designed to recognize a scholar whose work has added substantially to the body of knowledge in social psychology.